Technological University Dublin ARROW@TU Dublin Honor Moore People 2013 Honor Moore : A Cook's Life Honor Moore Follow this and additional works at: https://arrow.tudublin.ie/honor Part of the Food and Beverage Management Commons Recommended Citation Moore, Honor, "Honor Moore : A Cook's Life" (2013). Honor Moore. 1. https://arrow.tudublin.ie/honor/1 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the People at ARROW@TU Dublin. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honor Moore by an authorized administrator of ARROW@TU Dublin. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License A Cook's Life • IJFSC W'ltW IIIGorg MIX Papler lUI..,.,.. •ntwottungavollen Quell.r~ P•per from responslbl• MKJrces FSC" C1 05338 A Cook's Life Honor Moore © Photos: Edgar Family Texts: Honor Edgar • Honor Edgar (Moore) 28th May 1923 -29th May 2013 Honor Edgar's life was food. From picking ripe blackberries as a young girl in the fi elds whe re she kept her pony, cooking in the NAFFI kitchens during the war, pulling together meals on very little money for a large family after her husband died in 1965, creating, testing and perfecting recipes for her readers, to still being able to rustle up a delicious meal at over 8C !Years of age. ~his book is a beautiful melding of stories and recipes from a woman whose life story deser jves to be told. A remarkable woman whose incredible talent with cuisine touched the lives and pleased the palate of everyone she encountered. A book she w ould never see come ~o fruition, but in truth that is how she wanted it; she always wanted to have something to tvvork on. She had monumental battles with her computer but most of the work was saved by Kate. [I hough time stole her from us, Honor's eldest daughter Patsy painstakingly compiled this ~hortened version of what would have been an incredibly long and beautiful journey of a book. We present to you our tribute to a cook's life. HONOR EDGAR 1923-2013 By any yardstick, Honor was a most remarkable and exceptional woman. However, before 1speak exclusively about our Mum. I would like to refiect on her early years with her beloved ~am, our father. 1am indebted to our very close family friend. Noeline Coffey. who pointed me in this direc ~ion. During the war Honor had written to Sam every week to keep him up to date with the goings-on in their home town of Newtownards. He was in the RAF as some sort of ground operations person. They had apparently been mere acquaintances up to this but Dad treasured the weekly letter from Honor so much that when he twas invalided out of India. he returned to Newtownards determined to marry her. On the first of February 1947 they were married. He was then a journalist with the Newtownards Chronicle and she had started her daily cookery column in the Belfast Newsletter. A position in the Irish Times was advertised, Dad applied and RM Smiley took him on. This was a most prestigious appointment. as the Irish Times was pro bably second only to the London Times in terms of standing of all newspapers in these islands. hey moved to Dublin. A fiat in Pembroke Street was followed by the basement fiat in Palmerston Park and then 15 Temple Villas- that enormous house where we were all raised. hey were extremely happy together and the large rooms were perfect for the regular parties that they hos ed. I'm sure that the windows there are still rattling to the sound of Brendan O 'Dowda singing Percy French :,ongs. I vaguely remember one dishevelled drunken lout being escorted off the premises whilst continuing with his own song "The Auld Triangle" . As blow-ins from that very Protestant town of Newtownards. Mum and Dad had fitted in to the Dublin social scene. A_nd they reveled in it. Little did they know how some of the friends made at those parties would play :,uch an Important role in all of our lives later on. We thank them all for what they did. Enough said! I can only remember one row between them. Dad had been badly delayed by the hospitality of the Pearl Bar and came in somewhat under the weather. Whatever sparked it off, I will never know. but Mum chased Dad up the three fiights of stairs to the bathroom and he locked himself in pleading with Mum not to waken he children. Of course we were all awake! Apart from that moment, the house was happiness personified. We were taken on annual holidays - Curracloe. Co. Wexford. Connemara and then regularly to Glenbeigh. Co. Kerry. The big kitchen was the centre of all of the action with Mum cooking from morning til night. Dad's father had made her a rotating round griddle that connected to the gas on the cooker. Pancakes were made first to get the temperature right for the soda farls that were the main production of the day. Bread in the oven with an apple tart or crumble. Only on Saturdays should we not disturb Dad. He had been appointed Irish Editor of the Empire News and all of his stories had to be read to a copygirl in London - we dared not go near his office! ~he Empire News folded in 1960 and Dad started his public relations company. It was then only the second ~uch business in Ireland. He had taken a great leap of faith but it paid off and it was soon a thriving operation employing three staff with me as messenger boy delivering press releases to the papers after school every day. Let me focus now on our Mother. Honor Edgar. ~he wrote a daily cookery column for the Belfast Newsletter from 1944 to about 1968 under the nom de plume "Housekeeper". As Honor Moore she was cookery editor of Woman's Way and the RTE Guide writing weekly for both and compiling all sorts of supplements, features and even a small book for the Guide. In addition there was always something else going on in her cookery world. As examples, I can think of a TV series with ~om Doorley for RTE ; almost constant photo shoots of food dishes to a t company articles or PR promotions; ·udge this and judge that; and. of course. product testing. If the Edgar gang did not like it. forget it! Oh! She also raised the seven of us. Where did she find the time? In her own words .. she raised us by healthful neglect. How she managed to keep us from being dispatched to some institution, none of us will ever know. But that was very much on the cards. From what we now know about those places ... and we were to be aken there!!! o how did Honor's life give her the strength, the interest in cookery, the ability to be such a remarkable woman? Five years ago when the cookery assignments were diminishing (she was 85 after all), my sisters decided tho he should write a book- to keep her busy, you know. Patsy has produced a book on the Honor Edgar story. The stories are incredible to read, being snippets from her early life interspersed with recipes. In it Honor talks about her early family life. Of how her mother was sent to agricultural college in Cork where he cookery teacher was, and I quote "a very idiosyncratic lady who refused to use anyone's given name, but tagged nicknames on to the current intake every term. The cry would go out "Small. d ark, Protestant ne, come here and make bread". Her mother would cheerfully make soda bread. Remonstrated by the Matron, Cook simply replied "She 's small, dark, the only Protestant body in the school and she makes the bes bread". Cook also had a unique recipe for griddle bread. "Take two plates of fiour, a teaspoon of salt and half spoon of soda; mix with the fill of the wee blue jug of buttermilk" ... the art of accurate measurements as learned. It must have been the thing to do in those days because Mum was sent to agricultural college in Cookstown. gain 1 quote "It was designed to teach poultry keeping and dairying as well as cookery and home-making o farmers' daughters, enabling them to have a bit of financial independence. The money from butter and ggs went to the women, the last remnant of the Brehon laws, perhaps? It w as our first time away from home and probably the first time we had intimate contact with anyone of a different religion. We were all too bus nd often too tired to worry about "what foot anyone dug with". We walked three miles to church eve unday, those of us who were Protestant, envying the Catholic girls whose c hurch was on the outskirts o ookstown. The Church of Ireland church was in the centre of town (another half mile) , and the Presbyterian ne a further half mile. There were further complications- the Catholic service started half an hour before the thers and the Presbyterian minister could be relied on to preach for half an hour longer. As Sunday dinne as special. and on a first in first served basis, my new friend Mary Anderson and I considered slipping into he Catholic service. We decided we'd be seen, so we opted for the Church of Ireland and a leisurely wal back for dinner." his somewhat ambivalent relationship with religion was rammed home when Dad died.